1999

Rudolf Carnap was one of the leading figures of the Vienna
circle, a Viennese society which tried to establish a "scientific
philosophy" and which held such high standards that it rejected
Karl Popper's application for membership. Carnap's most ambitious
contribution to philosophy was his book The Logical Structure
of the World (1928), in which he tried to define our whole
conceptual framework in terms of one concept, recollection of
similarity. He was fond of science and art but hated the
metaphysics of Hegel, Bergson and Heidegger, which he regarded as a
perversion of both.

"The (pseudo)statements of metaphysics do not serve for the
description of states of affairs, neither existing ones
(in that case they would be true statements) nor non-existing ones
(in that case they would be at least false statements). They serve
for the expression of the general attitude of a person towards
life.

Perhaps music is the purest means of expression of this attitude
because it is entirely free from any reference to facts. The
harmonious feeling or attitude, which the metaphysician tries to
express in a monistic system, is more clearly expressed in the
music of Mozart. And when a metaphysician gives verbal expression
to his dualistic-heroic attitude towards life in a dualistic
system, is it not perhaps because he lacks the ability of a
Beethoven to express this attitude in an adequate medium?
Metaphysicians are musicians without musical ability. Instead they
have a strong inclination to work within the medium of the
theoretical, to connect concepts and thoughts. Now instead of
activating, on the one hand, this inclination in the domain of
science, and satisfying, on the other hand, the need for expression
in art, the metaphysician confuses the two and produces a structure
which achieves nothing for knowledge and something inadequate for
the expression of attitude." (Rudolf Carnap, "Überwindung der
Metaphysik durch logische Analyse der Sprache",
Erkenntnis, 1932)

Rudolf Carnap was born in Germany in 1891. He studied physics,
mathematics, philosophy and logic and was one of the leading
figures of the Vienna circle, which tried to establish a
"scientific philosophy" and which was allergic to the obscurantist
metaphysics of people like Hegel, Bergson and Heidegger. In 1935,
Carnap fled to the United States, where he died in 1970. Carnap
worked in the philosophy of science, logic and semantics. He was
one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth
century.

Hector-Neri Castañeda regarded the world as beautiful. He
used the beauty of the world to prove the existence of the freedom
of the will. Everyone believes that he or she has a free will. If
this were the result of systematic delusion, the world would not be
beautiful. But it is beautiful. So we have a free will.

Castañeda was more interested in the non-existent than in
what actually exists, and he regarded this as the universal human
predicament: "To be human is to be doomed (or programmed by natural
evolution--or by God) to think in order to live. To live,
biographically speaking, is at every step to transact with and even
to respect and love the non-existent. It is to play with fiction
and to hang up at least one half of one's autobiography on the not
yet existing future and spread it over some of the never-to-exist
branches of that future--building on the present remnants or
effects of the no longer existing past." (Hector-Neri
Castañeda, unpublished lecture, Moscow 1987.)

Hector-Neri Castañeda was born in 1924 as the son of a
poor peasant in one of the poorest districts of Guatemala (at that
time a military dictatorship). When he was four years old, his
mother moved to Guatemala City, taking her children with her. There
Castañeda was trained as a teacher at the military normal
school, until he was dismissed on account of meekness at boxing. He
completed his training in Costa Rica and then became a teacher of
Spanish at a girls' school in Guatemala. In 1948 he went to the
United States, where he studied with Wilfred Sellars and had a
successful philosophical career. He was the founder of
Noûs and the author of The Structure of
Morality (1974), Thinking and Doing (1975), On
Philosophical Method (1980) and Thinking, Language and
Experience (1989), along with a couple of hundred articles. He
died in 1991 of a brain tumor.

Castañeda first became famous by his discovery of the
fact that the meaning of a sentence such as "Caesar knew that he
crossed the Rubicon" is completely different from the meaning of
sentences such as "Caesar knew that the emperor of Rome crossed the
Rubicon" or "Caesar knew that Caesar crossed the Rubicon". His
profound studies of the central questions of ethics, the theory of
action, the theory of knowledge and semantics culminated in his
so-called "guise theory". According to this theory, individual
objects are to be regarded as sets of properties. Castañeda
was convinced that his theory offered a solution to the fundamental
problems of philosophy with which thinkers like Kant, Frege,
Russell and Wittgenstein had wrestled in vain, but this conviction
is not shared by every contemporary philosopher.